Shannon Mattern

Shannon is an Associate Professor of Media Studies at The New School. Her writing and teaching focus on archives, libraries, and other media spaces; media infrastructures; spatial epistemologies; and mediated sensation and exhibition. She is the author of The New Downtown Library; Deep Mapping the Media City; and Code and Clay, Data and Dirt, all published by University of Minnesota Press. She contributes a regular long-form column about urban data and mediated infrastructures to Places, a journal focusing on architecture, urbanism, and landscape, and she collaborates on public design and interactive projects and exhibitions.

How do our conceptual architectures manifest themselves in the everyday? How, for instance, might a data model scale up to an urban plan; or how might boxes and shelves, buildings and spreadsheets contain our thinkable thoughts? As we survey a variety of sites where the ethereal and datalogical become material — and, at the same time, where built and natural environments become informational — we'll also consider those dimensions of thought and experience that resist containment, as well as the politics of imposing order.